Myspace Murder: Williams didn't pull the trigger, wasn't at the scene

TRENTON — A detective admitted today that prosecutors know Keith Williams didn’t pull the trigger to kill Arrell Bell and can’t place him at the murder scene in Stacy Park the evening of May 1, 2008.

But retired Trenton investigator Steve White also told defense lawyer Mark Fury that cops tied Williams to the crime with Myspace talks between conspirators bent on killing Bell, 20, for supposedly snitching to police about a gang robbery.

There’s also almost five hours of the then 19-year-old Williams telling cops on video that he knows all about the slaying. But he always stops short of admitting key details like who fired the gun.

Seconds into the interrogation by White and Detective Robert Cowan, Williams told them, angrily, “I ain’t even shoot the mother (expletive). First of all, my position (as a gang general) and (expletive), I never have ta pull the trigger.”

Advertisement

Williams, not yet 20, told the cops all about being a five-star general in the Sex-Money-Murder wing of the Bloods and about how he didn’t really know Bell because the aspiring rapper was from a different sort of legacy, or “line,” in the gang.

The suspect also insisted in the video that he never gave final approval for the hit on young Bell, whom the gang feared would blab to police about an old robbery if he was able to get out of the city and to New York.

In his talk with police in 2008, Williams slouches in various positions in his chair and weighs about 100 pounds more than he does today, as White observed from the witness stand.

In a Myspace communication to alleged conspirator Karim Sampson hours before the murder, Williams complains that the others in on the plan are not around, “some where out in Ewing.”

“Wow daz crazi..” Sampsom responds. “Im bout to poke da kid. No homo… He’s supposed to be leaving to go to New York for 2 weekz… I can’t risk him not coming back. (eff) dat!”

On the street, “No homo” means no kidding, said a prosecution expert witness, state police Lt. Ron Hampton, whom Assistant Mercer Prosecutor Brian Mc Cauley brought in to interpret the slang for the jury.

And it’s no kidding that much of the street talk is not heard in polite society. Testimony will resume before Mercer Superior Court Judge Robert C. Billmeier on Monday.